Tuesday, December 7, 2010

I am offended...

by authors who come onto the Amazon threads and try to ingratiate themselves with the anti-indie folks there by saying, "Oh, but I'm not a lousy little self-publisher! I agree self-pubbed books mostly suck, but look! I've also got REAL books with REAL publishers!"

Um, yeah. Some of the rest of us have worked with publishers too, but we don't go around denigrating other indies to try to make ourselves look better. Don't pull down others and stomp on them while you try to establish yourself on Amazon, 'k?

4 comments:

I've seen quite a bit of this lately, but I saw a really egregious example today, and it set me off. I don't even think people mean it to be rude; I get the feeling most of them are newbies, and have no idea what is really out there now. They're probably still thinking of the old model of self-publishing, and don't realize that a lot of indie authors are very good and sell quite well.

I think this will start happening more than less. Now that so many indie authors are having real success and legitimizing the model, I predict many trad published authors are going to start admitting how many clothes the emperor is not wearing, and they're going to start jumping into the indie waters.

(argh; mixed metaphors much?)

Anyway, I have no doubt that at least a few formerly trad published authors are going to use that tack, thinking it makes them look more appealing to readers. I'm sure they BELIEVE that having been published by the trads means they are better writers.

I'm equally sure they won't mention to their prospective new readers that they didn't bring their editors with them...